The evaluation
on the carcinogenicity of red meat by the International Agency for Research
on Cancer (IARC) – and not by WHO as many media reported – has given rise to a
range of misunderstandings and is an example of how scientific communication on
topics with a major public impact may prove extremely difficult.

Healthcare is a crucial issue for Africa: every year, according to data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), hundreds of thousands of people in the African continent die due to infectious diseases.

During epidemics, pandemics, natural or
environmental disasters, the problem of communication is one of the primary
issues to deal with, and scientists and stakeholders know this well. It is a
two-sided issue: communicating risk without creating any alarms, and an
effective communication between persons who manage emergencies.

From bats to horses, from insects to chimpanzees, a lot of deadly viruses originated in an animal host. In his last book, Spillover, the American science writer David Quammen tells the stories of some of these viruses. We reached him at the Festival della Scienza in Genoa, where he was going to present the book, and asked him some questions.

It is
known that a virus like Ebola finds an ideal breeding ground of infection in weak
healthcare systems. However, the fear of a large-scale European contagion is
spreading. Although it is true that Ebola is really frightening, it is equally
true that a comparison between a country such as Italy and countries like
Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is at least difficult to maintain.
Tuberculosis, Malaria, HIV, low rates of vaccinations: the African ecosystem in
which Ebola has developed is crippled, and the majority of its inhabitants are
highly exposed to infections. How much crippled?

In the
globalised environment, the interconnection and interdependence of economies
enable pathogens to spread in unprecedented ways and extents. Human to human
transmission (close encounters of the first kind) occur with pathogens that are
well adapted to the human host, and spread between countries and continents. In
a similar way, pathogens spreading between animals (close encounters of the second
kind) spread not only within a farm, but also between different farms, due to
trade, or live animals or vector movement, in a transboundary manner.

Each outbreak
has some lessons to teach to those involved in health crisis management,
especially in terms of risk communication. In fact, any infectious disease can
become much more dangerous when supported by wrong or missing information. On
the one hand, misinformation can spread far and fast, especially online, often
crossing geographic borders before local organisations have ramped up their
response to an outbreak. On the other hand, the lack of proper information
about, for instance, how people get infected, may slow down efforts to contain
the diffusion of the disease.

Can
social media be used as a way to prevent the spread of infectious diseases?
Such a question is certainly on the agenda right now, with the Ebola outbreak
currently raging in West Africa and having already claimed the life of 887 people out of 1,603 cases since this March.

Does
outdoor air pollution cause lung cancer deaths? IARC says it does. It is an
historical day for epidemiology, toxicology and public health – this 17th
of October – since the greatest world authority on carcinogenic agents
presented in Paris the results of monograph n. 109 about outdoor air pollution.
Classified as Group 1,
i.e. carcinogenic for humans, outdoor air pollution is now considered as
dangerous as vinyl chloride, asbestos, formaldehyde or ionizing radiations.

Imagine about one thousand people equipped with smartphones which, in addition to the standard functions, serve to reveal using special
sensors, pollutants, and which, thanks to GPS, correlate the
findings whilst on the move. Now imagine that
these same persons are monitored as part of an
experiment where their blood and other
bodily liquids are taken, dosing them with the main metabolites; the medical
sphere monitors them and conducts surveys relying on questionnaires on primary
lifestyle habits.

The death toll in Taranto shows a dramatic increase according to the updated data of the Sentieri Study- for the 2003-2009 period - on the "causes of death, the biomonitoring and health risk related to air quality." The study was presented this week by Minister Renato Balduzzi, with the participation of the authors and the attendance of environmental associations' representatives.The first Sentieri study contained data up to 2002 and now we know that, in the Puglia capital only, overall death cases due to pollution increased by 1% compared to previous statistics, against the wh

On March 2, in Paris, the European Aphekom project, coordinated by the French Institute for public health surveillance (InVS), presented the results of a three-year study on air pollution and its impact on health, conducted by 60 researchers in 25 cities across Europe. Sorry for the sceptics, but the data are once again worrying, with the important new information that health impact is now associated with a monetary impact.